A “business process” is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific result typically associated with providing a service or product for a particular customer or customers. A business process often can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or with a process matrix as a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on the data in the process.
A business process engine is an execution framework for a given business process template, which may be depicted by a Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) diagram. For example, a BPMN representation of a business process may be created by a designer of the business process. The BPMN representation may then be used to generate source code to implement the business process, e.g., by providing a template that can be used to create operable instances of the business process.
A process instance is an executing instance of the process template and may be invoked using different invocation contexts, e.g., message events, user invocation, etc. Each instance upon invocation typically is given contextual input data on which the process activities/task will operate on. The contextual data may be associated with a single or multiple process instances.
A process engine is responsible for the invocation of a process instance, its state and life-cycle management. During execution a process instance maintains its state and life-cycle information in the runtime engine and process data structures.
From time to time, a business process definition or model may need to be updated, replaced, superseded, etc. It may be necessary or desirable to update a business process definition quickly, and to have such an update implemented at a remote system one or more attributes of which may not be known to a developer of the updated business process definition.